“She told me so, but how can she have any affection for such a man as I have shown myself to be? I think she was sacrificing herself because she believed I was the one who could bring down the Flagg drive.”
Mern surveyed him cynically. “Say, Latisan, I hope you’re not the kind who would bite a gold coin stolen from a dead man’s eye. You woods fellows have too much time for joint debates with your own selves. Go find that girl and square yourself. I want her to have what she wants, if she is in love with you. That’s the kind of a friend I am to her. I can’t tell you where she is. I haven’t heard from her since she walked out of this office. But let me say something to you! My kind of work has wised me up to what folks are likely to do! I’ll bet a thousand dollars the girl hasn’t run very far away from the north country, even if you did think it was too hot to hold you.”
Latisan shook his head slowly. Confidence was still chilled in him; the memory of what had happened was a forbidding barrier; in her case, at the thought of thrusting himself back into her presence, he was as timid to an extreme as he had been fearless in his dealings with men in the Vose-Mern offices.
While he was wrestling with his thoughts, delivery men were wrestling with furniture, bringing it in through the door from the corridor, blocking the passage.
Mern snapped his attention from Latisan, then he pushed the latter out of the range of vision from the corridor door.
Craig was out in the corridor, cursing the furniture and the men who were obstructing the doorway. Craig was in a hurry and in a state of mind; his language revealed his feelings.
“It won’t do—it won’t do!” insisted Mern when Latisan protested at being shoved behind the partition. “He mustn’t see you. Hear him rave! I’m not staging another fight to-day. Stay in there! Crouch down! Keep out of sight.”
When Craig won his way past the blocking furniture he stormed to Mern, stamping across the glass-strewn floor, shaking his fists and jabbering.
He was in a horrible state of rage. His face was so apoplectically purple that the bruises on his patched-up countenance were subdued somewhat by lack of contrast.
“Look at me! Called down to the home office just now, looking like this. Lying like blazes about an automobile accident! That’s what your invitation to view the tame tiger has done for me. But that isn’t what I’m here for, you damnation, four-flushing double-crosser.” He continued to berate the chief.